1. Field
This invention generally relates to payment for products or services. The invention specifically relates to methods and systems that enable providing an alternate form of payment for products or services.
2. Background
Existing systems for lead generation in advertising of products and services have drawbacks that either result in diminishing marginal return, or inefficacy. Acquiring access to high quality leads that have a relevance to the product or service being advertised or promoted is considered of higher value than less relevant or random leads.
In addition, on-line response to advertisements, offers, and promotions continues to support increasingly higher levels of spending by advertisers, and product or service providers, for high quality leads. This has led to an increasing shift to online direct marketing from all segments of the marketplace. Recent annual spending in this segment increased substantially.
Meanwhile, consumers continue to seek ways of acquiring goods and services, such as software and other digital goods and services, at lower prices, or for free. In particular, many consumers are not accustomed to paying for premium content and services online, such as software, publications, games, etc, especially since there are many free alternatives. For many online goods and services, especially digital products where the marginal cost of additional production is negligible or zero and the digital item is not tangible, a fair economic value of these goods and services is hard for the consumer to quantify. This makes a traditional purchase decision difficult. Also, there is a phenomenon of comparative taste; that is, the willingness of customers to pay for particular goods and services varies from customer to customer. One customer may be willing to pay full price for one item but unwilling to pay at all for another item, while for a second customer the situation may be reversed. Thus, the demand for a particular item reflects a distribution of prices at which particular customers are willing to pay for the item, ranging from zero to the highest price that any single customer would be willing to pay. For goods and services with respect to which the marginal cost of production is negligible, a merchant would ideally like to differentiate among these customers, charging each one of them a price that reflects the extent of that particular customer's demand. This distribution of demand also results in merchants valuing different customers differently. A particular type of customer may be highly attractive to one merchant, because that customer places a premium on that merchant's offerings, while the same customer may not be attractive for another merchant, because the opposite is true with respect to that merchant's offerings. Thus, applicant has recognized that a need exists for methods and systems that allow merchants to provide an opportunity for customers with low willingness to pay to for one merchant's item to engage with other merchants (advertisers) for whom the customers have a higher willingness to pay for the alternate merchant items, and visa versa. In this way, both the original and secondary merchants benefit from the customer's differentiated tastes (willingness to pay for one item over another).
A need also exists for methods and systems that facilitate gaining access to high quality leads by online advertisers and others who benefit from these leads and for allowing consumers to benefit from such access by participating in favorable offers for such goods and services. Stated from the perspective of the vendor, there is a need to “monetize” non-paying users who are unwilling to use traditional payment methods to access premium goods and services online and to establish an alternative payment mechanism that enables these users to barter other sources of value (such as customer demographics) not catered for in traditional payment methods.